The Psychology of Space

Can a Norwegian firm solve the problems of Times Square?

Rising from a fjord, Snøhetta’s Oslo Opera House has become a kind of public square.

Photograph by Nicholas Kane / Arcaid

The home of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, in Oslo, resembles a glacier that’s calving great wedges of glass and white marble, and at night its windows, which are huge, project sheets of amber light onto the Oslo Fjord. Yet the Opera’s main impact, since its opening, in 2008, has been civic rather than aesthetic. It was built on an old industrial site as part of a larger effort to reclaim a stretch of ruined waterfront, and, despite its unpromising location, its roof—which slants upward from the harbor and seems to emerge from the water—has become a busy public square. Parents push baby carriages to the top; tourists pull suitcases from the train station; swimmers, sunbathers, kayakers, and swans treat the western edge as a beach. Dog walking, Tai Chi, and sunset watching are popular. For a performance of “Carmen” in 2009, the opera company showed a free simulcast on a large screen in front of the building, and some five thousand people spread picnic blankets on the roof to watch it. During the building’s inaugural performance, a young couple were discovered making love above the auditorium. One of the architects told me that he considered their act both a compliment and the building’s “consummation.”

The Oslo Opera House was designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta, which was named for an object (a mountain in central Norway) rather than for a star partner or partners. There are two principals, both in their fifties: in Oslo, Kjetil Thorsen, who is Norwegian; and in New York Craig Dykers, who is American but has spent most of his life in Europe, including sixteen years in Norway. Both downplay their personal contributions to the firm’s designs, and neither has an instantly recognizable style. Dykers described Snøhetta’s approach to me as “collectivist,” and said that “anyone can suggest anything about anything.” Thorsen called the firm’s ethos “open, direct, accessible, egalitarian—strange value words that don’t mean anything until you see what they do.”

One manifestation of that ethos has been an eagerness to take on potentially exasperating public assignments. Snøhetta’s first American commission was for an entrance pavilion at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, at the site of the World Trade Center. The pavilion isn’t large, but, because of a succession of complications involving the entire site, the building is still unfinished, eight years after the contract was awarded. More recently, the firm was chosen by New York City to, in effect, redesign Times Square—one of the city’s most famous landmarks and, for residents, perhaps its most despised one. A third of a million people pass through the square daily, yet the visitors are mainly tourists and their predators, and when the big theatres let out on summer evenings the human crush can seem cataclysmic. Among Snøhetta’s goals, Dykers told me, is to reconfigure the space in such a way that city residents will stop walking blocks out of their way to avoid it. Construction is expected to begin this summer.

Both the Times Square and the Oslo Opera projects are attempts to use architecture to alter a city’s relationship to itself. Both also depend on successfully managing the complex psychology of public space—a Snøhetta specialty, and a field in which the firm has drawn insights from an eclectic range of sources. Dykers told me that among his architectural influences for Times Square are books and articles about livestock management by the animal scientist Temple Grandin, whose work has been informed by her autism. “There’s so much emphasis on consciousness in philosophical discussions,” he said. “But I think consciousness is a small part of who we are. I have a friend who had a sheepdog, and he said whenever he had a party it would herd the guests. It would tap their ankles or their knees, until, by the end of the evening, everyone at the party was in one corner. The dog was happy, but the important thing was that nobody noticed. As architects, I think, we have to try to be like the sheepdog at the party.”

Snøhetta’s Oslo headquarters is a fifteen-minute walk from the Opera, near a cruise-ship terminal on the Oslo Fjord. The building is warehouse-like, and its entrance doesn’t face the street. Its exterior is so nondescript that, after I’d walked a hundred yards past it, a policeman I asked for directions pointed me the wrong way. The interior is mainly one huge room loosely divided into three zones, which Thorsen, whom I met there, characterized as “the head” (desks, drawing tables, and computers for roughly a hundred employees); “the stomach” (a commercial kitchen and two long rows of dining tables, at which everyone eats lunch); and “the hands” (workshops in the back). The side of the building facing the fjord contains many tall windows, and I asked Thorsen whether the water view, which is sweeping, wasn’t a distraction from work. He said that, in fact, the view acted as an office-wide pulse lowerer and productivity enhancer. “The harbor has a sort of slowness,” he said. “The ships start over there, and after half an hour you look up and still see them.”

Thorsen is tall, and he has short reddish-brown hair and a skimpy graying beard. He speaks with about as much urgency as a cruise ship traversing the Oslo Fjord. In 1987, when he was twenty-nine, he and a small group of other young Norwegian architects and landscape architects formed a studio, which they named for the tallest mountain in what is now Dovrefjell-Sunndalsfjella National Park. The group was more concerned with drinking beer and discussing ideas about architecture than with designing actual buildings, but, in 1989, Thorsen and a few other members decided to enter an international competition to create a modern replacement for the legendary Library of Alexandria, which was burned in 48 B.C. They teamed up with an Austrian architect friend of Thorsen’s and an American friend of the friend’s—Dykers—who had been working on their own proposal in Los Angeles.

The Alexandria competition accepted more than five hundred submissions, from architects all over the world, many of them famous. Snøhetta, at that point, wasn’t just unknown; it wasn’t even a real firm. Thorsen, Dykers, and their friends created their proposal in an apartment in Los Angeles, which they’d rented for six weeks. They leased furniture from a company that supplied props to movie studios. “It was a film-set office,” Thorsen told me. “The stuff in it was real stuff, but what was unusual was that we were using it for its real purpose.”

The main design challenge, Thorsen said, was finding a way to honor the ancient library’s legend without seeming to displace it. “It had to be something completely new, so that you wouldn’t confuse it with the picture in your head. At the same time, it had to make some impression of being great, and maybe even monumental. But it had to be a human monumentalism, which then opened up and invited people in.” The site was at the edge of the city’s harbor, near what is believed to be the location of parts of the original library, but it was relatively small and was in a neighborhood dominated by undistinguished institutional buildings, separated from the water by a broad boulevard. For the main building, the architects designed a truncated cone with a slanting, circular roof facing the Mediterranean, and they placed four of the main library’s eleven floors underground, so that the entrance would be in the middle of the structure. For most of the curving exterior of the main building, they specified a windowless sheath of unpolished granite blocks, carved with thousands of written characters, from a hundred and twenty ancient and modern writing systems. The carved-granite expanse was meant to provide a symbolic bridge between the original library and the present, while also shielding the building from winds that sweep up from the Sahara.

Thorsen, Dykers, and the others felt that they had no chance of winning. “But we did think that our design was unique,” Dykers told me, “and that the judges would give us something.” Thorsen said that, when the selection committee called, he couldn’t tell whether the man on the line, who was Egyptian, was saying “first” or “third.” “I thought it was a joke, actually,” he said, “and I had to get a number and call back. But it turned out that we had won.”

The new library wasn’t completed until 2001; merely negotiating the contracts took until 1993. But Thorsen said the drawn-out schedule was actually useful, because the delays gave the young architects time to acquire an address, permanent furnishings, and the equivalent of a postgraduate education in design and construction. Training Egyptian workers to carve the symbols in the granite sheathing took two years. (The symbol scheme was created by Jorunn Sannes, a Norwegian artist, who is Thorsen’s wife.) For several years, the architects received financial support from various sources, including the Norwegian government and UNESCO—a necessity, Thorsen said, because when the project began they were all broke.

The roof of the Oslo Opera looks like a dangerous place: people seem to be walking up to and along the edges, without railings to keep them from plunging to the marble expanse below. But the peril is an illusion, because the main surfaces are separated from the edges by a ha-ha, a sunken walkway that functions as a barrier. The Snøhetta architects took the idea from zoos. They also angled the roof in such a way that, as you climb, you can seldom see other buildings. The effect is exhilarating: the people ahead of you and to the side are often silhouetted against the sky, as on a mountain. And at the bottom, where the roof slides into the water and disappears, there’s a similar sense of exposure, which feels both precarious and liberating.

One afternoon, a former member of the Opera’s ballet company gave me a tour. (The dancers retire, with a state pension, at forty-one; opera singers retire in their fifties.) We began in the vast foyer, which is open and bright and fully visible from outside. Its main feature, which Snøhetta calls the Wave Wall, is the curved exterior of the auditorium. It’s covered in unstained strips of oak, and it looks a little like the way the Guggenheim Museum might look had Frank Lloyd Wright specified oversized matchsticks for the exterior rather than painted concrete. The oak strips vary in thickness and in color, and they have been arranged randomly, to scatter sounds and to create a nonuniform texture.

The doors to the Opera foyer are unlocked most of the time. “Everyone can come into this house,” my guide told me. “Someone wrote that our opening hours compete with 7-Eleven’s.” (One consequence is that the restrooms in the foyer are among the most heavily used in the city.) The Opera’s success has strengthened Snøhetta’s interest in “keyless” structures—public spaces that never close. A recent example is the firm’s Norwegian Wild Reindeer Center Pavilion, in Hjerkinn, about four and a half hours north of Oslo, which has won several design awards. The building is roughly the size and shape of a shipping container. It is situated on a rocky hilltop across a valley from Mt. Snøhetta, and it has one long glass wall, facing the mountain. Visitors come there to contemplate the scenery and, if they are lucky, to observe passing herds of reindeer and musk oxen. The rear wall was fabricated from a stack of ten-by-ten pine timbers by a Norwegian shipbuilding firm, which used a computer-controlled industrial machine to carve undulating recesses, in which visitors can sit or recline. The wall looks as though it had been shaped over eons by wind or moving water, and as you look across the valley you feel as if you’re sitting in the mouth of a cave. When I visited, a national-park employee, whose job title was “nature interpreter,” told me that she had brought an elementary-school group to the pavilion on a field trip early one recent morning, and that the children’s boisterous arrival had awakened a couple who had spent the night on the floor—another “consummation” of a Snøhetta design.

At the Opera, an initially controversial decision by Snøhetta was not to conceal the functions that support the performances. Six hundred and fifty employees, in several dozen specialties, work in a four-story structure, called the Factory, which extends from beneath the upper end of the sloping roof. If you walk around to the back, you can watch through large windows as workers design sets, build scenery, sew costumes, mix fake blood (an operatic staple), and perform other backstage chores. Some of those workers objected, at first, that visibility would destroy the mystique of the performances, but since then virtually all have come around, and many now display samples of their work on their windowsills. The transparency of the Factory, my guide told me, has increased local acceptance of the high price of opera tickets: people can see where the money goes.

One of the relatively few parts of the Opera that aren’t visible from outside is the interior of the main auditorium. We visited it last, and entered by way of the uppermost balcony. The over-all impression made by the rest of the building is of light—large expanses of glass, white marble, and honey-colored wood—but the auditorium is enveloping and hushed and cathedral-like. My guide described it as “a magic world” and said that she was still moved each time she entered. The balcony fronts and other wooden elements were milled into subtly complex curves by the shipbuilding company that created the seating wall for the reindeer pavilion, and the wood, which is oak, was treated with ammonia to darken it. The seat cushions are tomato-red and orange, and against the background of the woodwork they have the visual impact of stained glass. The seats are sized and upholstered so that they have virtually the same sound-absorption properties when they are empty as when they are occupied. In the previous hall, as in many auditoriums, performers had to adjust their voices depending on whether they were rehearsing in front of empty seats or performing before a live audience.

Snøhetta’s New York office is in the old Cunard Line Building, on lower Broadway. It overlooks Arturo Di Modica’s “Charging Bull,” a three-and-a-half-ton sculpture, which stands at the northern end of Bowling Green Park and functions as a tribute to Wall Street. The spot is a popular destination for tourists, many of whom pose for photographs with the statue. Dykers told me that he has observed the crowds around the bull for years, and that the tourists can be divided roughly equally into those who pose at its head and those who pose at its rear end. (The bull’s nose, horns, and testicles have been rubbed, for luck, to more or less identical degrees of shininess.) Dykers said the statue is a useful reminder that humans are diverse, and have their own ideas about design. “A lot of our work as architects takes into account that just as many people are interested in the backside of the bull,” he said.

Dykers is more compact and less rumpled-looking than Thorsen, but he is similarly self-effacing. It took me a couple of days to realize that Elaine Molinar, who also works in the New York office and has been a member of the firm since the Alexandria project, is his wife. (“There are people at the company who didn’t know for several years that we were married,” he told me.) They met in the early nineteen-eighties at the University of Texas at Austin, where both were undergraduates and where Molinar studied ballet before switching to architecture. They live in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn, near Fulton Landing, and commute to work by ferry.

Snøhetta opened its New York office after receiving the commission for the World Trade Center pavilion, and one afternoon I walked over to the site with Anne Lewison and Aaron Dorf, Snøhetta architects who have been involved in the pavilion’s design for several years. We put on hard hats and yellow vests, and, after a security check, we entered a gate at the edge of the construction zone. The site is still chaotic, but the part of the plaza surrounding the memorial fountains—which are set within the spaces once occupied by the foundations of the Twin Towers and were designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker—is already one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. Snøhetta’s pavilion, now tentatively scheduled to open in late 2013, is an asymmetrical three-story crystal of stainless steel and glass which appears to have fallen from the sky and embedded itself in the plaza. It will contain the security checkpoint for the 9/11 Museum, which was designed by the American firm Davis Brody Bond, as well as a food area, a small auditorium, and a sanctuary-like room reserved for the survivors of 9/11 victims. Designing the pavilion was complicated by the fact that no part of the building has its own foundation: most of the structure sits on top of a PATH station, which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and the rest overhangs the museum. “We couldn’t even add things,” Lewison said. “We couldn’t say, ‘Could you just give us a little more cantilever here so that we can pick up the north side of our building?’ So the north side of our building is actually hung from a shaft at our roof level.”

Lewison said that she and her colleagues had viewed the project’s constraints as a challenge rather than as an annoyance, and had employed several optical tricks to make the building seem bigger. The irregularity of its shape and subtle horizontal stripes in the glass-and-stainless-steel cladding, she said, make the pavilion’s dimensions unclear to someone viewing it from the plaza. “You don’t know how big it is,” she said. “If you’re standing close to it, it looks like it could be really tall, or really long, and if you look along one of the sides you have a sense of great length.” The ambiguity is similar to the infinite-edge effect on the roof of the Oslo Opera.

Snøhetta’s largest American project currently under construction is an expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The current museum building, which opened in 1995, was designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, and it’s a darkly forbidding structure: a red-brick fortress on a crowded urban block in what used to be a marginal neighborhood. Snøhetta will leave the Botta building mostly intact; the addition, when viewed from the street, will look a little like a white ocean liner parked behind and above it, and it will roughly triple the museum’s gallery space. Accommodating the expected crowds—SFMOMA’s annual attendance has more than doubled since 1995, to roughly six hundred and fifty thousand, and the expansion will attract more—will require some of the same feeling for urban dynamics that guided Snøhetta’s design for the Opera. This past summer, the engineering firm Arup, which is also working on the project, ran a computer simulation called a “visitor-flow model,” which enabled Snøhetta to observe how elements of its design would be likely to affect the movements of museumgoers. The architects were able to fill a computer model of the building with hundreds of virtual human visitors, and study what happened. “Each person gets programmed,” Dykers said. “Weight, height, walking speed, interests. Then you set them in motion, and you can see where you need more stairs or bathrooms or ticket booths, and you can actually see what people’s irritability levels are.”

The goal of such an exercise isn’t always to eliminate sources of irritability; sometimes, he said, the most interesting results come from creating impediments rather than removing them. Thorsen told me, “The roof of the Opera enabled people to experience certain things they hadn’t experienced before. I think that’s interesting in architecture—to generate new situations. So you dislocate and you locate. You remove known obstacles and you introduce new ones. By doing that, you change the movement, and by changing the movement you change the perception of the space. And it’s exactly the same thing with Times Square.”

Dykers has a brother, five years older, who was a gifted structural engineer until, in his late thirties, he suffered a cerebral aneurysm and, as a consequence of surgery that was intended to repair it, lost his ability to remember new things. “You’ve probably seen the movie ‘Memento,’ ” Dykers told me one day. “My brother is basically like that, but not as dramatic. He doesn’t tattoo reminders on his skin, but he keeps papers in all his pockets and calls them his memory. His math skills are still amazing. I play chess with him sometimes, and if he leaves the table and comes back he won’t remember whether he’s white or black or what his strategy was. But he will notice, when he sits down again, that you are obviously on that side of the table and he’s on this side, and he’ll see where the pieces are on the board, and in his mind he’ll try to retrace the game backward and then run it forward—and that gives him an advantage, paradoxically, because he sees the mistakes. And he will almost always beat you.” The brother can’t function as an engineer anymore, but he has inadvertently helped Dykers in his work as an architect, because his brain injury, Dykers said, makes him a perfectly naïve test subject. “He can’t rely on memory to navigate through spaces. If we’re in a restaurant and he goes to the toilet, he won’t remember how to get back to the table, even if he’s been there ten times. So I watch him, and try to understand what clues he’s using to move through unfamiliar surroundings.”

How people move through unfamiliar surroundings has been a central issue for Snøhetta in Times Square. David Burney, who runs the city’s Department of Design and Construction, told me, “Ninety per cent of the people using Times Square are pedestrians, yet ninety per cent of the space was devoted to cars.” In 2009, the city began trying to shift that balance, by converting especially troublesome sections of roadway into pedestrian zones. It covered the asphalt in those zones with paint—in Times Square, the paint is now mostly tan (like beach sand) and blue (like the ocean)—and it installed café tables, chairs, and large plastic planters. The modified road plan improved traffic flow and reduced the number of accidents—“They took away the knot,” Dykers told me—but managing the tidal surges of pedestrians remained problematic. In 2011, the city engaged Snøhetta to complete the transformation.

One afternoon, Dykers and I met at his office and then took the subway uptown to look at the site. As we waited for an express at Fourteenth Street, he said that in most stations you can anticipate where the doors of the next train will open by looking for concentrations of chewing-gum splats near the edges of the platforms. (Subway riders apparently tend to spit out gum either just before entering or just after exiting a train.) Much crowd behavior is predictable, Dykers said, but it isn’t perceived consciously by the crowds themselves. “Your brain is working continuously, gauging things like reflections and space and shapes,” he said. “You’ll hear people say that they’re more likely to collide with other people in Penn Station than they are in Grand Central, and the reason is that when you have hundreds and hundreds of people in one place there’s a natural movement that your body will make to get out of the way, and in Penn Station there’s not enough room to do that. It’s counterintuitive, but I think one reason Grand Central works so well is the kiosk in the middle of the main concourse. You’d think it would be a disaster, since it’s right in the center of everything, but it pushes people to the sides and creates more flow. It’s like fish swimming around rocks in a stream.”

We emerged from the subway at Forty-second Street, at the southern end of Times Square, and headed north, into a part of Seventh Avenue from which motor vehicles have been banished. In most places in the United States, planning has heavily favored the automobile. The Times Square project is unusual in having removed car lanes rather than added them—a gain for pedestrians in what was already one of the most pedestrian-friendly cities in the world. But the memory of cars is strong. Dykers and I walked for about a block in a blue-painted zone, and in comparison with the sidewalk it was practically empty. Dykers observed that simply removing the vehicles hadn’t caused pedestrians to inhabit an area that, despite the paint, they still registered as roadway. “A curb—especially two parallel curbs—says ‘street,’ no matter how much you paint it,” he said. “The reason is that your brain is saying, ‘Street! Car! Danger!’ even though the pavement is blue and you know, consciously, that no cars are there.” Snøhetta will eliminate the vestigial curbs, and raise the entire pedestrian space to the level of the existing sidewalks, removing the subliminal danger signal.

We crossed a section of tan pavement, toward Broadway. “The paint is fun,” Dykers said, “and it was well done, for what it is, but these kinds of bright color seem out of place in Times Square. In people’s collective memory, Times Square is not about the beach.” It had rained overnight, and Dykers said, “It’s nice that the ground is wet, because you get a kind of reflection that we want to bring back. The first time we came here, it had also just rained, and that made us think immediately about how we could create a more monolithic surface.”

Other firms’ proposals for Times Square have typically involved adding visual complexity—especially lights—but Snøhetta took the opposite approach, and its design constitutes what David Burney described to me as a refreshing “de-cluttering.” Dykers told me that he and his colleagues had studied historical photographs, and decided that a critical element missing from the square’s modern iteration was a uniform band of relative darkness at street level, in contrast to the frenetic light show created by billboards and other signage. In old photographs, he said, there was also usually a band of darkness above the billboards, because in those days the lights in office buildings were less likely to be left on all night. There’s no way to restore darkness in the offices above Times Square’s lights, but Snøhetta’s plan will darken the zone beneath. The pedestrian surfaces will be finished with gray concrete pavers. The pavers will be studded with nickel-size stainless-steel “pucks,” which will be slightly reflective, but the sidewalks won’t contain lights. Their purpose will be to frame the existing illumination, not to augment or compete with it.

Dykers and I walked along one side of a row of tub-like planters, which divided a pedestrian area from a traffic lane. The planters were added by the city when it changed the lane configuration, and they serve both as decorations and as protective barriers. They won’t be there for long, though. “All the vegetation you see here now will be eliminated,” Dykers said. “It’s not natural for a tree to be here. These big planters get cigarettes thrown into them, and people pull plants out of them, and on New Year’s Eve the city has to remove them because people climb on them and sit on them and pee in them, and it’s not good for the plants. Putting trees here would actually be the opposite of green.”

Dykers pointed to a man standing beside a fire hydrant and smoking a cigarette. The hydrant was flanked by three steel stanchions, which created an enclosure that was isolated from the crowd on the sidewalk. “See where he’s standing?” Dykers said. “He has unconsciously chosen this one protected place, where people can’t bump into him.” In Snøhetta’s plan, large granite benches will perform much the same function, by providing places for people to sit or stand, and by breaking up pedestrian spaces in ways that provide navigational cues. The benches, some of which will be fifty feet long and five feet wide, will conceal built-in access to electrical, digital, and fibre-optic networks, reducing the need for power cables and generators for events held in the square.

As we pushed our way through a particularly dense crowd near the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Dykers told me about a discovery the firm had made while surveying the site. “It was our landscape architects who noticed it,” he said. “At first, we couldn’t believe it, but Times Square isn’t flat. It’s actually hammock-shaped.” Three creeks once flowed together near the low point, not far from the intersection where we were walking. Although the old streambeds are now buried deep beneath asphalt and concrete, the depression they created remains. “It was like a sump,” he said. “We blew up a photograph and connected the dots of all the heads of all the people, and when we did that the elevation change was obvious. There’s an eight-foot drop over two or three blocks, and that’s the reason the area floods in a heavy rain. You don’t notice it when you stand here, because the space is so gigantic, but eight feet is a lot.” The topography of the square compounds the sense of congestion, creating a kind of “nightmare” zone near the bottom of the hammock; to a pedestrian walking there, the crowds to the north and the south seem to be pressing down from above. Snøhetta can’t change the city’s contours, but its redesign should reduce the sense of menace, by widening the pedestrian space near the pinch point.

We sidestepped some people who were selling tour-bus tickets and some people who were giving away comedy-show tickets. “It’s commonly believed that tourists love Times Square and New Yorkers hate it,” Dykers continued. “That’s fairly true, but New Yorkers, no matter how cynical they may be, are always going to be amazed by the lights, even if they’re angrily running through it. The challenge is that they’re not connected to it in the way they were seventy years ago, when they went there to listen to radio broadcasts of Yankees games and speeches by President Roosevelt, and Times Square really was New York’s space as well as the ‘Crossroads of the World.’ ” Reëstablishing even a semblance of the old relationship won’t be easy, he said, but he believes that much of what residents perceive as a problem with tourists is actually a problem with design, and designs can be changed. “Architects are magicians,” he said. “Now, we know that magic doesn’t really exist, but magicians have methods they use to make it seem real, and even though we know it’s a trick, we can’t quite believe it’s fake. They ask us to step outside of our ordinary world and view it from a different perspective.”

The most conspicuous landmark at the northern end of Times Square is the TKTS booth, just beyond the statue of Father Duffy, in the tiny plaza known as Duffy Square. The booth was completed in 2008. It has a roof that resembles a fan-shaped staircase, whose treads and risers are made of red laminated glass, and pedestrians use it as a rest area and observation post. It exerts the same sort of attractive force on visitors that the roof of the Oslo Opera does, though on a smaller scale, and its appeal is undoubtedly enhanced by topography: the roof faces downhill from the square’s highest point, like a scenic lookout at the rim of a valley. Dykers told me that he loves the TKTS plaza and that Snøhetta won’t alter it, although it will widen the pedestrian spaces on either side, where large crowds of prospective theatregoers stand in line to buy tickets.

We walked up the glass steps, which the rain had made somewhat slippery, and two young men—one black, one Hispanic, both wearing black T-shirts and jeans, both in their twenties—asked Dykers if he would take their photograph. Dykers hooked his umbrella over one elbow, and the two men leaned toward each other and smiled.

“Where are you guys from?” Dykers asked.

Both laughed, and the black guy said, “We’re actually from here. I never came up here before, ever—and I’m from here.”

The Hispanic guy said, “I live right down the street!”

Dykers explained who he was, and described the changes that Snøhetta was planning.

“Like, New Yorkers don’t come to Times Square, because it’s so annoying,” the black guy said. “So that will help out. That will be cool.”

“It’s the greatest city in the world,” the Hispanic guy said. “Come on.”